Medically Wasted

So, this business of all that NHS medical waste which wasn't being disposed of properly, not only is it another warning about the perils of public bodies outsourcing vital functions to low-bidding private contractors, but surely it is also the sort of thing you just can't make up.  As the story has unfolded, I've been left musing as to just how the company was planning to dispose of all those body parts that they were apparently unable or unwilling to process normally.  I mean, just why would you stockpile it in the first place?  Could it be that this wholesale storage was part of some sort of retail operation, whereby people could order body parts online, which would be dispatched by mail from the company's warehouses?  A kind of Amazon for illicit organ supplies.  After all, I'm sure there's a market out there for this sort of stuff - mad scientists spring to mind.  Unless countless Frankenstein films have lied to me, budding monster makers traditionally had to resort to digging up freshly buried corpses at dead of night in order to secure the components they needed to assemble their creatures.  And when that failed, they had to resort to murder.  In this modern era of CCTV everywhere, graveyards aren't the easy target they once were.  Besides, people tend to be cremated these days, making those fresh body parts even more difficult to come by.  How much more convenient would it be if you could simply go online and select the arm or leg (perhaps even brain) you need and have it sent to your laboratory?  No more miserable rainy nights stood in graves with hunchback assistants prising coffins open.

Then there are all those shady private clinics which provide multiple organ transplants to the fabulously wealthy in order to rejuvenate them so that they can enjoy another hundred years of exploiting the poor.  Imagine how much easier it would be for them to order up organs in bulk, rather than having to trawl the streets looking for suitable down and outs whose organs they can harvest.  Or lure unsuspecting illegal immigrants into their basements with promises of cash in hand work, before gassing them and stealing their innards.  Moreover, the medical waste disposal guys selling the stuff could probably provide provenance for their products, so that the shady clinics would be able to guarantee their clients that it is all top quality stuff sourced from nice middle class white people.  it could also be a good service for necrophiliacs - after all, most of them wouldn't need a complete body: just a hand would probably be sufficient for most of their needs.  Then there are those people with basements full of ravenous human flesh craving zombies.  A situation which occurs more easily than you might imagine: it only needs some voodoo rituals to go a bit awry and you suddenly find yourself with half the denizens of the local graveyard wandering around, for instance.  Rather than having to lure unsuspecting victims to your house to feed them with, you can simply order up all the human offal they can eat.  The same sort of thing would apply to practicing cannibals, of course - an easy and discreet way to feed your dinner guests next time you host a meeting of the local cannibal association.

It did occur to me that maybe they were 'storing' some of this stuff in their own homes, disguised as ornaments and fittings.  How many of the firm's employees houses boasted lamps fashioned from severed arms, or candle holders made from human hands?  Bike racks made from bums (as in the old Billy Connolly joke)?  In fact, there's probably a commercial market for that sort of thing Ed Gein apparently liked to decorate his house with 'ornaments' fashioned from body parts he had robbed from local graves.  Just imagine if he could have ordered all that stuff online (if they'd had the internet in the fifties which, obviously, they didn't) - he wouldn't have drawn so much attention to himself and might have evaded capture.  There's also the Nazi market - you know the sort of shit they like: books bound in human skin, lampshades likewise made from human skin.  Their warped tastes could be catered for without resort to genocide by recycling some of that hoarded medical waste.  Sadly though, I can guarantee that this medical waste scandal didn't involve anything as imaginative as any of my suggestions,  It will probably all turn out to be about money, as it usually is in these outsourcing failures: the contractors take the public money but, in order to maximise profits, don't actually do the job.  Sad and sordid.